
OOW Keynote, Larry Ellison
I honestly thought I was going to have to wait longer to hear anyone from Oracle talk about seriously focusing the company’s hardware and software lines on the Cloud. True, they’ve been saying cloud-like things for a couple of years but the pronouncements were features and functions that added something to the cloud discussion without […]

Larry Buys the (Pineapple) Farm
Larry Ellison recently bought 98% of Lanai, a small Hawaiian island off Maui. No, I am not making this up. If I could write fiction like that I wouldn’t be in this business. Or maybe I would but I’d be better paid. At any rate, the article in the New York Times says Lanai has […]

Oracle and the Vision Thing
“Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete […]

Oracle Buries the Lead
by Oracle_Photos_Screenshots At his second and final keynote address to the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld user meeting, Larry Ellison finally gave the rabid software oriented audience something to savor. Throughout the week the Oracle CEO and his minions had spent large amounts of time telling us about hardware or some other aspect of the business leaving […]

#OOW11 WTF! Larry Cancels Marc, Oy…
WTF! I’ve been writing, talking and meeting all day. I thought I had the night off when this bombshell went off (it comes directly form Twitter): “RT @Benioff: Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Sorry #oow11! Join me @ St. Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! The show must go on! Sorry Larry!” There are so […]

Pay the Man, He’s Worth It
Musings on Oracle OpenWorld October 2 to 6 Oracle OpenWorld won’t start until a reception on Sunday night but that won’t stop many of us from writing something about Oracle or the event before a word is spoken. And there are so many things to say. There will be the usual product centric talks and […]

Shark Jumping at Dreamforce
The clear lesson from this week is that you can over do it. And when the spotlight is on Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft or whoever, that company has the public relations advantage. They have millions of dollars staked on a successful outcome and some skunk works prank by a competitor is not likely to achieve anything positive for the simple reason that it’s ad hoc and the principal vendor has been planning the event for a year.

The CEO is the Decider
“… organizations are becoming more social but perhaps the right application hasn’t come along yet to enable a CEO to be more social in a professional setting.”

Open World — You had to be there
A lot went down at Oracle Open World and you are probably as tired of reading about it as I am of writing about it. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all and you can easily find it on line if you wish. I was impressed with several things that […]

Oracle OpenWorld Cloud Orthodoxy
Writing about the seminal event for CRM at Oracle Open World — the public cloud computing debate between Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff respective CEO’s of Oracle and Salesforce.com — is tougher than coming up with rent and alimony. There are so many threads to pull together and I have so much history following the […]